NANJING, CHINA
Known as the Southern Capital in China, Nanjing is a vibrant and beautiful city with historical political prominence. The city is a centre for education and is the capital of Jiangsu province. Nanjing has also seen rapid development with large rural communities migrating into Nanjing over the recent years. As a result, Nanjing has undergone rapid expansion to accommodate this continued in-migration.
Food consumption patterns in Nanjing also reflect the unique challenges inherent in the Nanjing food system. In order to support consumer demands for food freshness and safety, the Nanjing food system has evolved to present multiple avenues to responsibly source and produce food. While supermarkets and e-commerce of food have been growing rapidly, wet markets still dominate the supply of fresh produce. Nanjing represents both historical importance and modern innovation which make this city a dynamic example of an urban food system.
RESEARCH on NANJING
HCP REPORTS
PAPERS
Opening Access to Urban Food Security Data in Africa from the Hungry Cities Partnership
The Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) initiated a 7-year programme of food system research in eight cities of the Global South in January 2015: Mexico City, Mexico; Kingston, Jamaica; Windhoek, Namibia; Cape Town, South Africa; Maputo, Mozambique; Nairobi, Kenya; Bangalore, India; and Nanjing, China. This paper describes the research process in the four African cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Nairobi, and Windhoek. The HCP data provide rich and context-specific information useful in avoiding generalizations in theory and inserting a Southern and ...
Towards a New Food Security Index for Urban Household Food Security
The multidimensionality of food security can confound both statistical modelling and clear policy narratives. That complexity can become amplified in urban areas where food security is often a function of both local and global factors. Rather than focusing on one dimension of food security metrics, this investigation proposes a method for building an index of urban household food access, utilization and stability. The performance of this index is compared across three aggregation methods using household surveys collected from five cities ...
Affordable Food Shops and Urban Food Security in China
Food subsidies have been widely implemented as part of government policies to mitigate food insecurity among the urban poor. The effectiveness of supply and demand-side subsidies have been a source of debate in the literature. One form of supply-side subsidy designed to make food more affordable to low-income consumers is to offer subsidies to retail outlets. China’s affordable food shop (AFS) program is one such example. The program was introduced by the central government in 2011 and implemented by municipal ...
State-Led Localization of Food Provisioning and Food Security in Urban China
Food localization has been extensively studied and advocated in Western countries, focusing on its oppositional stance to food system globalization, long food supply chains and agribusiness, the disconnect between producers and consumers, and a desire to reconnect urban consumers with small farmers in the hinterland of cities. More recently, these localization models have been taken up by international agencies and others and “exported” to the Global South. Rapid urbanization in the Global South has led to a major and growing ...
COVID-19 and Emergency Food Security Policies in Urban China
The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to spread worldwide, threatening people’s health as well as their food security. Yet, empirical research investigating its impacts on food security is scant. Limited attention has been paid to the local food security management implications of an infectious disease pandemic. To narrow these gaps, this study investigated the development of emergency food policies in Wuhan and Nanjing in China and households’ food security, based on a combination of online surveys of household food security and ...
Food Security Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Wuhan and Nanjing, China
After decades of famine and thousands of deaths caused by food shortages and starvation, China was able to achieve food security for the majority of its population through ensuring food availability. Despite this, during COVID-19, the government needed to heighten their responses to ensure food security and faced several challenges in doing so. This paper analyzes Chinese policies around food security during COVID-19 in two cities: Wuhan and Nanjing. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s definition of food security ...
Revisiting China’s Supermarket Revolution: Evidence from Nanjing City
Like many emerging economies in the Global South, China is experiencing major transformations of its national and local food system characterized by the rise of supermarkets. There has been an ongoing debate on the relationship between the supermarket and the wet market in developing countries. Drawing on data from a city-wide supermarket mapping and surveys conducted in Nanjing in 2019, this paper revisits China’s “supermarketization” process and challenges the prediction of supermarket domination. It reveals that Nanjing’s food retailing system ...
The Role of Infrastructure Access in Urban Household Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in Southern Cities
The geographical concentration of poverty in informal neighbourhoods across cities is a common socio-economic feature of the urban form. Many of these impoverished areas also suffer from limited access to urban infrastructure. Given the expense and planning necessary to develop urban infrastructure, these areas are socially vulnerable in part because of their exclusion from urban master plans. This vulnerability is made more severe by the knock-on impacts of limited infrastructure access on other aspects of human insecurity. This paper uses ...
Food Retailing Transitions and New Retail Businesses in Nanjing, China
China’s food retailing sector is transitioning towards a digitalized consumer society in the context of widespread food safety anxiety. At the forefront of this transition is an innovative form of food retailing called New Retail Businesses (NRBs). Based on field research and interviews with key stakeholders in Nanjing, this study outlines distinctive features of NRBs in contrast to the conventional food system. It also points out that NRBs have shared goals with the government’s Vegetable Basket Project. Thus the implementation ...
Wet Market Vendor Profits in Nanjing, China: A Spatial Analysis
Wet markets play an important role in urban food security in many Asian countries. Existing research pays more attention to the wet market food accessibility of urban residents and less on the business operations and profits of wet market vendors. Based on a survey of 1,119 small food enterprises in Nanjing, this study employs the spatial analytical method Geodetector to explore spatial variations in vendor profits in Nanjing. The study shows obvious spatial differentiation in the profits of wet market ...
Governing the Informal Food Sector in Cities of the Global South
The role of the informal food sector in the urban food system cannot be appreciated or understood without the compilation and analysis of systematic and representative data on the activities of informal enterprises across a city and along food supply chains outside it. At present, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base about the character, operation, and roles of the informal food sector; a pre-requisite for sound and supportive governance. This paper presents evidence on the relative importance of ...
Modes of Governance of Street Food Vending in Nanjing, China
In the Global South, the informal food economy is both a source of income for disadvantaged urban groups and an accessible source of food for consumers. Yet governance of this economy has commonly been restrictive in Southern countries including China. Consequently, in China there has been an antagonistic relationship between vendors and chengguan (China’s city management officers). This antagonism has been studied by researchers and reported by Chinese media. This discussion paper uses semi-structured interviews with street food vendors to ...
Achieving Urban Food Security through a Public-Private Hybrid Food Provisioning System: A Case Study of Nanjing, China
Private and public markets are two models of urban food retailing governance. This paper examines the public-private hybrid model of urban food provisioning system and its governance in Nanjing, China. Based on data from surveys, non-structured interviews, and bibliographical material analysis, we examine the public-private hybrid model and its linkages with urban food security. Our analysis shows that the public-private hybrid model of food markets and its governance ensures a relatively high-level urban food security in Nanjing. We argue that ...
Cross-Platform Food Shopping and Household Food Access in Nanjing, China
Modern urban food systems have evolved into international, multi-scalar and complex networks. The historical evolution of the food system in Nanjing, China, exemplifies this complexity. Nanjing’s food system has undergone successive waves of modernization, bringing changes in consumer food sourcing behaviour along with it. Using household survey data, this investigation assesses the cross-platform food sourcing behaviour of households in Nanjing to untangle some of the complex relationships linking food retailers to consumers in the city. The findings indicate that the ...
The Impact of Proximity to Wet Markets and Supermarkets on Household Dietary Diversity in Nanjing City, China
Existing studies suggest that despite the proliferation of supermarkets, traditional wet markets have persisted in many countries and have been playing an important role in people’s daily food access. Yet, studies investigating the issue of food access and its influences on food security have mainly focused on food deserts and the proximity to supermarkets, with limited focus on wet markets and other food outlets. This study investigates the influence of the proximity to wet markets and supermarkets on urban household ...
Comparing Household Food Security in Cities of the Global South through a Gender Lens
Understanding the determinants of urban food insecurity requires sensitivity to local cultural contexts and taking into account a globally relevant framework for analysis. A gender lens is amenable to this kind of analysis because it is rooted in local configurations of households, livelihoods and consumption patterns, while also being animated by a longstanding global effort to create a world in which men and women are equal. This discussion paper is aimed at academic researchers and development practitioners concerned with urban ...
Supermarkets, Wet Markets and Food Patronage in Nanjing, China
Although supermarkets have become a dominant food outlet for urban residents in developed countries, studies of food purchasing in developing countries such as China report a persistence of traditional food outlets, despite a proliferation of supermarkets over the past two decades. Yet, little is known about urban residents’ use of various food sources in the Chinese context. Building on the debate over the rise of supermarkets and the persistence of traditional food outlets, this paper analyzes the landscape of competing ...
Approaching Sustainable Urban Development in China through a Food System Planning Lens
After more than two decades of rapid urbanization, Chinese cities now face severe sustainability chal- lenges in terms of balancing economic viability, social justice, and environmental protection goals. While various types of planning have long been adopted to cope with these challenges, food as a centrepiece of daily life and of social and economic activity in cities has rarely been considered as a focus of urban planning in China, despite a lot of recent attention to food waste and food ...
Hungry Cities of the Global South
The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predomi- nantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. This discussion paper aims to correct this unfortunate omission by reviewing the ...
POLICY BRIEFS
Improving the Profitability of Wet Market Food Vendors in China
The characteristics of individual vendors and their business operations have a more significant impact on business profits than more general socioeconomic factors. Policy interventions need to prioritize the former. The profits of wet market vendors vary spatially in Nanjing, China. The average profit level in central urban districts is higher than in peri-urban districts. Almost all determinants have more significant impacts on vendor profitability in peri-urban than urban areas. Measures should therefore be taken to improve the profitability of wet ...
Demand: The Forgotten Side of Informal Economy Policy
Policymakers who seek to support informal economic activity too often rely on supply-side solutions that fail to address the central needs of the urban poor. Efforts should instead focus on the alleviation of poverty to ensure that potential customers have the economic means to buy sufficient food to meet their needs. Governments must prioritize the promotion of adequate formal employment opportunities to ensure that the urban poor have livelihood options beyond informality.
Food Security and the Changing Landscape of Food Retailing in Nanjing, China
The expansion of supermarkets and online food markets are changing the complexion of food retailing in Nanjing. At the same time, traditional forms of retail display considerable resilience. Nanjing has low levels of food insecurity overall as measured by the HFIAS and HDDS. The one in five households who are food insecure are primarily low-income and female-centred. Concerns over food safety are a major characteristic of all consumers in Nanjing irrespective of income and food security status. Policy implications include ...
The SDGs, Food Security and Urbanization in the Global South
As governments develop policies to achieve SDG 2 in rapidly urbanizing countries, the need to pay particular attention to the role of the informal economy, non-food issues, pro-poor pricing structures and healthy food consumption patterns will increase. The case studies in Mexico, China, Kenya and India have highlighted important food security challenges facing urban dwellers and how to overcome them by targeting existing food systems such as supermarkets, the informal economy and PDSs. While local context will dictate the best ...
BOOK CHAPTER
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THESES
Study on Carbon Emission Pattern and Emission Reduction in China’s Food System: A Life-Cycle Perspective
— PhD Thesis — In the Special Report of Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) issued by IPCC in 2019, it was pointed out that as Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions emitted from the food system accounted for 21-37% of the total anthropogenic GHG emissions. Accounting for GHG emissions from the food system has also become the basis for assessing the impact ...
Transitions to Ecological Agriculture in Nanjing, China: Farm Types, Social-Political Networks, and Rural Communities
- PhD Thesis - China’s rural and agricultural sector has been undergoing a dramatic transformation in the form of three major trends. First, the modernization and capitalization of agriculture has significantly modified traditional agriculture and exacerbated path-dependency towards an agro-industrial paradigm. Second, the Chinese government at various levels has been promoting an ‘ecological civilization’ that highlights science and technology to ...
Study on the Impact of Accessibility of Different Types of Fresh Food Stores on Food Security in Households: A Case Study of Nanjing City
— Masters Thesis — With the improvement of income and living standard, people are not only satisfied with the food consumption, but also need to eat nutritionally and healthily. The food security level of a family is not only influenced by its own eating habits, but also by the surrounding food environment. The accessibility of food retail places is an ...
The Impact of Food Deserts on Food Insecurity of Urban Households: A Case Study of Nanjing City
- Master Thesis - Obtaining adequate, nutritious and healthy food is the basis for maintaining human survival and development. Improving residents’ accessibility to healthy food has become an important issue in people’s livelihood, health and household food security, the food system of urban communities is receiving more and more attention from planning managers. Since the food retail outlets are not ...
Study on the Impact of Wet Markets Accessibility and Equality of Spatial Distribution on Food Security in Households: A Case Study of Nanjing City
- Master Thesis - With the development of the social economy and the improvement of the living quality of the residents, the quality andquantity of the food demand of the family is getting higher and higher. The degree of food security in China is widely concerned by the international community. FAO and some countries extend food security from a macro ...
Research on Food Security and Its Influencing Factors Based on Cognition of Urban Household: A Case Study of Nanjing City
- Master Thesis - In recent years, the topic of farmland loss and food safety in China attracted more and more attention in policy. Continuous attention has been paid to food security at the national level, while it’s urgent and necessary to analyze the problem of food security from household or individual level. At the same time, as the meaning ...
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Revisiting China’s Supermarket Revolution: Complementarity and Co-evolution Between Traditional and Modern Food Outlets
Like many emerging economies in the Global South, China is experiencing major transformations of its national and local food system characterized by the rise of supermarkets. There has been an ongoing debate on the relationship between supermarkets and wet markets in developing countries. Drawing on data from a city-wide supermarket mapping and surveys conducted in Nanjing in 2019, this paper revisits China’s “supermarket revolution” process and challenges the prediction of supermarket domination. It reveals that Nanjing’s food retailing system has ...
From Overt Opposition to Covert Cooperation: Governance of Street Food Vending in Nanjing, China
In the Global South, the informal food economy is both a source of income for disadvantaged urban groups and an accessible source of food for consumers. Yet, governance of this economy has commonly been restrictive among Southern countries including China. Consequently, in China there has been an antagonistic relationship between vendors and chengguan—China’s city management officers. This antagonism has been studied by scholars and reported by Chinese media. In response, several Chinese municipal governments, including Nanjing’s, reformed their regulations to ...
Urban Household Food Security in China and Mozambique: A Gender-Based Comparative Approach
International comparison of development indicators is a perennial challenge in global development studies. The challenge is especially difficult when measuring urban household food security using experience-based metrics that are influenced by countless contextual factors. This article presents a gender-based analysis of household food security surveys conducted in Nanjing, China and Maputo, Mozambique. The analysis demonstrates the value of a gender lens for understanding the intersecting household characteristics associated with urban food insecurity. While Maputo had much higher food insecurity overall, ...
The Impact of Proximity to Wet Markets and Supermarkets on Household Dietary Diversity in Nanjing City, China
This study investigated the influence of the proximity to wet markets and supermarkets on urban household dietary diversity in Nanjing. Based on the data collected through a citywide survey in 2015 and the map data of wet markets and supermarkets, the Poisson regression model was deployed to examine the correlations between geographical proximity to supermarkets and wet markets and household dietary diversity. The result shows that the coefficients for the distance to the nearest wet market are not statistically significant. ...
The Impact of Proximity to Wet Markets and Supermarkets on Household Dietary Diversity in Nanjing City, China
This study investigated the influence of the proximity to wet markets and supermarkets on urban household dietary diversity in Nanjing. Based on the data collected through a citywide survey in 2015 and the map data of wet markets and supermarkets, the Poisson regression model was deployed to examine the correlations between geographical proximity to supermarkets and wet markets and household dietary diversity. The result shows that the coefficients for the distance to the nearest wet market are not statistically significant. ...
Wet Markets, Supermarkets and Alternative Food Sources: Consumers’ Food Access in Nanjing, China
Based on a survey of 1,210 households in Nanjing, China, the article looks at the purchasing frequency of various food items in different food retail outlets, the accessibility of these outlets and the use of different food sources. We found that while supermarkets are the top venues for purchasing staple grains, dairy products and processed food, wet markets still prevail for purchasing fresh produce and meat. The data also depict the complexity of food sources beyond conventional retailing outlets. We ...
Food Safety in Urban China: Perceptions and Coping Strategies of Residents in Nanjing
Food safety has become an increasingly pressing sociopolitical issue in China due to the outbreak of food safety scandals since the 2000s. Existing studies have highlighted the socio-economic context of this issue, its drivers and implications. Yet, few studies have examined the perceptions of food safety conditions and strategies undertaken by consumers in their daily lives to cope with the challenge. Based on a city-wide survey of 1210 households and 36 interviews in Nanjing, China, this research adopts an ‘everyday’ ...
Carbon Flow of Urban System and Its Policy Implications: The Case of Nanjing
China is now in the process of rapid urbanization. City׳s operating efficiency was directly determined by the scale and efficiency of energy consumption and flow. The pattern, scale and efficiency of urban carbon flow are not only important indicators that reflect urban efficiency and sustainable development, but also important references in the formulating low-carbon and sustainable energy polices for cities. Through establishing a theoretical framework and calculation method, this paper studied the carbon flows of Nanjing urban system in three ...
Urban Carbon Footprint and Carbon Cycle Pressure: The Case Study of Nanjing
Urban carbon footprint reflects the impact and pressure of human activities on urban environment. Based on city level, this paper estimated carbon emissions and carbon footprint of Nanjing city, analyzed urban carbon footprint intensity and carbon cycle pressure and discussed the influencing factors of carbon footprint through LMDI decomposition model. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The total carbon emissions of Nanjing increased rapidly since 2000, in which the carbon emission from the use of fossil energy was the ...
RESEARCH BRIEFS
COVID-19 and Food Security in Urban China: Wuhan and Nanjing Compared
To contain the spread of COVID-19, governments around the world have adopted various regulatory measures, many of which have drastically and often unintentionally interrupted food supply chains and reshaped the food environment in cities (Aday and Aday 2020, Carducci et al 2021, Crush and Si, 2020, Swinnen and McDermott, 2020). The measures taken by the Chinese government were especially interventionist and included locking down a whole city, closing all food outlets, and establishing a state-organized food distribution network (Zhong et ...
From Wet Markets to Online Purchase: Food Shopping Patterns During COVID-19 in Wuhan and Nanjing, China
Wet markets have been the backbone of urban food provisioning in Chinese cities for several decades now (Si et al 2016, Zhang and Pan 2013, Zhong et al 2018, Zhong et al 2020). The role of wet markets as the primary source of food in cities may be shifting, however, as the COVID-19 pandemic draws food purchase away from wet markets to online platforms. Online food platforms emerged and grew over the last decade and the pandemic has boosted this ...
Food Security Challenges in Chinese Cities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Globally, one of the major consequences of public health responses to the spread of COVID-19 is seen as an increase in food insecurity as agriculture and food supply chains are interrupted, food outlets are shuttered, household income to spend on food declines, and people are partially or completely quarantined at home (CFS 2020, Clapp 2020, Crush and Si 2020, WFP 2020). These impacts are being monitored by the Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) in a series of blogs and a media ...
Mobility Controls and Urban Food Policy Responses to COVID-19 in China
At latest count (June 20, 2020), there were over 9 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and over 450,000 deaths. While there has been an explosion of biomedical research on the pandemic, detailed empirical research investigating the impact of COVID-19 on food security is scarcer (Crush and Si 2000). This project is therefore examining the impacts on household food security in Chinese cities during the first wave of the pandemic. The main objectives are to: (a) investigate the immediate food ...